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The Middle Path of Marketing - A Philosophy

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The Middle Path Philosophy

Taking the middle path is a concept that promotes balance, diversity and moderation. Itâs a philosophy that covers so many aspects of life and when applied to marketing can bring tremendous insight. Itâs essentially about acting in moderation, evaluating all options and making informed and balanced decisions.

My first encounter with this philosophy came from the Medieval Spanish philosopher, physician and scholar Maimonides. Maimonides proposed that in everything we do, we should always tend to the middle path. He writes: "The upright path is the middle path of all the qualities known to man. This is the path which is equally distant from the two extremes, not being too close to either side.â (Yad hachazaka Chap 1. Law 4). He goes on to explain that this includes everything from finances, to character traits.

Later on, I discovered that this idea predates Maimonides and is actually Aristotelian in nature. Aristotle said that exercise, virtues, courage, indulgence and more, all need to be taken in moderation. Itâs the path between excess and deficiency. (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Section 9)

In Buddhist theology there is also the expression of the âmiddle wayâ in connection with the path to achieving Nirvana.

In life, there are so many instances where this makes sense. Research by Schwartz and Grant has demonstrated that many phenomenon follow an inverted U-Shaped curve, where there is a point along the line after which the positive effects of phenomena turn negative. Graphically, this looks like this:

In this example, performance increases with arousal, but only to a point, where more arousal decreases performance. There is an optimal point or inflection point at which maximum performance is achieved.

Schwartz and Grant go so far as to suggest that âpsychologists have good reason to believe that life is nonmonotonicâŚ.this may be a fundamental and ubiquitous psychological principle: There is no such thing as an unmitigated good.â (Where nonmonotonic means that there is an inverted U structure, whereby at high levels, costs outweigh benefits.).

The Middle Path of Marketing

This being such as ubiquitous phenomenon, letâs apply it with to what we do here â Online Marketing. I find this philosophy manifests itself across all aspects of this discipline, from Web Design, SEO, PPC, Analytics and Strategy. Here are several examples:

Choice

Selling products on a website involves giving our customers choice. Intuitively, we think that the more options we provide the better experience our customers will have. Itâs not so. Iyengar and Lepper found that more choice is actually demotivating and can be detrimental in many cases to sales. Schwartz and Grant claim that âas choice increases, welfare increases, but the relation is not linear: there are diminishing marginal benefits to added optionsâ. Schwartz has also written extensively about this in his book âthe paradox of choice, why more is lessâ.

Choice on a website can cover a large range of aspects. Things like: choice of products, choice of accessories, choice of information and choice of social media platforms to share on. It certainly takes a central role in website design and marketing, as having to little choice will limit our ability to compete with competitors, however too much choice will be confounding for customers.

The optimal number of choices will be different depending on the context. Itâs important to test and find that optimal inflection point where too much choice becomes constricting.

Information in Moderation

Content marketing is a popular catchword these days and itâs often about creating great resources on our websites. Having a great resource will attract interested people and help to establish a company or person as a thought leader in their industry. We often see things like âthe ultimate guide toâŚâ or âeverything you needed to know aboutâŚ.â

Investing in this type of content is great, but to a degree. There is a point at which you can approach information overload. Compiling pages and pages of information on the intricacies of a topic is going to be tedious. Readers want to be able to find the information they need quickly, so keeping these guides and website content concise is a consideration. It is about finding that sweet spot between having enough to be considered authoritative and encompassing, but not having too much, to make it not useful.

The same applies to media types. Having videos, audio, infographics, graphics, all on one page can also become overbearing. You need just enough to be interesting and helpful.

Backlink Profiles

Moving over to offsite SEO, part of any good strategy will be to increase the number, quality and type of the backlinks to your website. There is a strong correlation between backlinks (quality and quantity) and rankings. However, a good strategy doesnât simply need to pursue high quality backlinks, but rather a diverse range of backlinks. This is because itâs important to keep the profile natural and not trigger any algorithmic penalties.

The below graph shows the backlink profiles of four clients. The graph shows the number of backlinks per client at each level of Domain Authority (DA), where DA is a measure of the domain quality.

You see in the graph that Client D has a large amount of backlinks under DA 25. The link profile is positively skewed. At first glance, this looks good as it has a much larger quantity of links then other clients, but really this means that there is a disproportionate amount of low quality links coming into the site. This is a strong indicator that unnatural link building is occurring and this also places the domain in a low quality neighbourhood, by associating it with these similar low level DA sites.

Client A on the other hand is actually in a much better position, they have backlinks more evenly spread out along the DA spectrum, with a larger number of inlinks at higher levels like DA 30 to 45.

The ideal link profile will look more like a bell curve:

This is preferable because in general it is very difficult to acquire links from high profile, high DA sites. Similarly, you want to keep away from too many easy low quality DA sites. Ideally a good site that wants to rank well should have most of its inlinks from sites in the medium range.

This is a perfect example of the middle path in action, graphically. The key is diversity and moderation.

Diversify your Overall Strategy and Channels

In finance, portfolio theory proposes that by diversifying investments you can maintain return and minimise risk. Schwartz and Grant say in their paper that âAll positive traits, states and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefitsâ.

The same is true online, there are a many different inbound channels that you can utilise to achieve your marketing goals:

Organic Search

Paid Search

Display advertising

Social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc..

Email marketing

Direct marketing

Referral, affiliate, etcâŚ

If you invest too much in one area, the benefits are eventually going to outweigh the cost. Itâs critical to follow the middle path philosophy. It is too risky to put all your eggs in just one or two baskets, but at the same time, you canât spread yourself to thin either.

Analytics reports such as Multi-Channel funnels can help you assess how your different inbound channels work together. You can see how activity in one channel helps drive conversions through another.

For example, I may run a campaign on a social network to raise awareness of my brand or product. If this sparks interest and later on a user searches for my product in a search network, but canât find me, then the effort goes to waste. Your efforts need to be diverse, but should focus on core areas for which you have enough resources.

Paid Campaigns

The same is true if you drill down into any of your channels specifically. Paid campaigns are especially good because of the large amount of available data. It is easy to evaluate these campaigns according to CPA goals once your tracking is setup.

With Adwords optimisation, the best strategy is one that is based on the middle path philosophy as well. Campaigns that have too wide a reach will become irrelevant, yet campaigns that are too specific will miss out on much of their potential. The best strategy is one that has a broad reach, yet is filtered to exclude everything that is irrelevant. I put this into practice using broad match modifier to begin with and then over time strictly filtering out negatives.

Another mistake that companies make is to have a set CPA goal for all campaigns. The issue here is that the market is different for different products and the reality is there is different conversion rates based on this. CPA goals or other goals need to be set appropriately based on the reality within the market. Itâs important to first achieve profitability in any campaign, then look to minimise CPA and maximise conversions. This should be done campaign by campaign, and not restricted as a blanket rule. Again this middle path strategy is ideal because it starts out with a broad reach and then based on profitability campaigns are optimised or removed to end up with the optimal number of campaigns within the account.

Data Puke

This is a term coined by Avinash Kaushik in reference to having too much data in your web analytics reporting, making it difficult to understand what is going on.

Having too little data or reports will make it difficult to find insights and draw actionable conclusions. Similarly having too many reports and too much information per report is overwhelming, leads to data puke and makes it harder to find the important data.

The key is to find your sweet spot. This is the specific path, guided by your business goals, that provides the right amount of reporting to give you just enough data on the information you need. Avinash often talks about having just four key reports in Google Analytics, one per each section. Each of these can give you a wealth of information. For more advanced Analytics users, these can come in the form of custom report templates and advanced segments. Hear Avinaush himself talk about these specific reports in this discussion. Also, find more discussion on Data Puke here.

Challenges to the Middle Path

The middle path is not without its challenges. These are the challenges that I have encountered and my thoughts in how to overcome them:

Taking a stand

Sometimes itâs important to take a stand in life. You donât always want to be a fence sitter. If something is really great and it works for you, then you should go with it and perhaps sometimes stray out of the middle just a bit. But even then, too much of anything is a bad thing. Even too much water can kill you, it is called Hyponatremia and it can be fatal.

Where is the Middle?

My biggest issue is that it is not often clear where the middle is. As a philosophy of life, in some ways you are always in the middle. If you look to one extreme you will find people there and if you look to the other you will also find people in that direction more extreme then you. So you are in the middle of them.

They way around this is to quantify as much as you can. For example, studies found that the ideal amount of financial income in order to be a good parent is around $75,000 per year. Any less than that and the parent needs to spend less time with their kids in order to make money, any more and it doesnât provide any more benefit to parenting, it makes it harder to say no. The only way you can find an average is by gathering the data and doing the math.

In marketing, we need to be able to quantify this as well. For a DA curve, it is relatively easy to see where the middle is. Similarly, when it comes to choices, experiments can help you find the optimum. Itâs harder when we review multi-channel marketing and multi campaign marketing. Everyoneâs business, resources and goals are a bit different so the middle will be slightly different.

Conclusion

Many of us find our middle path naturally, others tend to extremes. I find when I take on something new that in the beginning I tend to an extreme and then over time I settle down into a middle path. I think itâs important to diversify early and then evaluate. Recognising the importance of the middle path and becoming more aware of it, can help us get to the optimal point quicker, both in life and in business. Certainly in the sphere of online marketing it is manifest from a top-level strategy all the way down to the way we view data and make specific optimisations.

What do you think? Are you currently following the middle path, should we really be looking to the middle, or should we take a stand?

"Ideally a good site that wants to rank well should have most of its inlinks from sites in the medium range" - Does it mean that medium range is 3*Ď^2? As i remember about 80% of links should be in range [ -3*Ď^2, +3*Ď^2]

DA 30 to 60, (a slight positive skew). I don't have large data sets to confirm this quantitatively, but i've seen quite a few backlink profiles, and I consistently see penalised & low ranking sites look more like 'Client D' in the first graph. 'Client A' is in a much healthier position and also tends to rank much better for the whole domain.

I enjoyed the post and love the idea of the balance/middle ground of marketing and life in general..good stuff!

I must say though, I'm not a fan of the language being used in this conversation. When we start talking about finding and building links from websites with specific Domain Authority metrics in mind...we are walking down the slippery slope of manipulative link building practices. I wrote an article called the Golden Rule of Link Building where I echo thoughts from people like Eric Ward and Matt Cutts himself--build links that make sense for your business! Whether that means building a relationship with a niche local blogger with a 20 Domain Authority or being featured in a 90+ DA site, if it has the potential to drive quality traffic/exposure to your business, then it's worth pursuing. I like to ask the question "would I want this link if Google didn't exist? Once we start targeting our link building efforts based on stats like DA..we're potentially putting our sites at risk.

Thanks for your comment. I'm assuming that you prefer language like 'link earning', I think they are interchangeable.

I agree that we should be earning links from sites that make sense and drive traffic, however we do need to have some kind of quality gauge. We need this gauge primarily because at the end of the day we need to make sure our profile is in line with what Google wants which is a diversified 'natural' looking profile. Without this you might get into trouble.

Furthermore this is the reason that a company like Moz has created this DA metric and that it is so widely used, because we really need to have some kind of understanding of the quality of our own site & other sites and try and understand how Google is looking at it as well.

Agreed that DA is a good indicator of site strength-- for sure! I just really like the philosophy of link building that results in valuable traffic instead of focusing efforts on building links to match what Google says they want to see (for now). I'm trying more and more to build/earn links from sources that can diversify a sites web traffic sources! Imagine having 70% of your traffic coming from a variety of valuable referral sources (links) and 30% from organic search. Obviously it's usually the opposite and we are therefore forced into doing things geared toward fine tuning the 70% of traffic we have coming from search :/ I'm just a fan of giving Google less power over marketers by obsessing over their flavor-of-the-week algo updates

Mark, this is a very interesting post -- I never thought I'd see someone bring up Rambam here at Moz! :)

I had a couple thoughts:

If you invest too much in one area, the benefits are eventually going to outweigh the cost. Itâs critical to follow the middle path philosophy. It is too risky to put all your eggs in just one or two baskets, but at the same time, you canât spread yourself to thin either.

I may be misinterpreting your thoughts, but it seems that you're stating that a diverse set of channels and tactics (organic, paid, social, e-mail, and more) needs to be used in theory simply for the sake of pursuing this "middle path." But in reality, I'd argue that only the channels that are relevant should usually be used. (And one's boss or client would demand that you use the one (or ones) that delivers (or deliver) the greatest ROI or other KPIs.)

Nutshell: If my target audience predominantly uses Facebook but not LinkedIn, I'm not going to use LinkedIn. If no one is searching Google for relevant terms, then I may not target organic search and may instead use PR to increase awareness of the company and its product or solution. And so on.

However -- and this my contradict my point -- I would also say that it's also important not to "put all your eggs in one basket." Just look at how Facebook recently all but killed the organic reach of page posts. If 100% of a company's marketing efforts had been on Facebook, then that would have been very bad. After all, Facebook owns your Facebook page, Twitter owns your Twitter account, and so on.

I suppose these points may contradict themselves, but I think it's important to keep both in mind. Well, hey -- perhaps that's another example of the "middle way"!

Rambam is one of my favourite thinkers. As you can see, many of his ideas, still profoundly influence the things we do today.

I agree that we should be focusing on channels which are relevant to our business and customers. But how will you know which channels these are, if you don't diversify, test and experiment? This is the crux of the middle path philosophy. Diversify, try different things and make better informed decisions. Of course over time refinement is necessary - this is what optimisation is about. The process of optimisation is important for all marketing and not just for search engines (SEO). Just like paid search campaigns constantly need to be optimised, so too our overall strategy needs to be optimised over time as well. If certain channels are working better then others then these should be advanced.

(Don't worry - I spell optimisation with an (s) because I'm Australian)

But yeh, even though optimisation requires refinement, the middle path forces us to not tie ourselves to too few channels, but to keep an open mind to other possibilities. Also, the middle is different for everyone, so it could help you think differently and outside what your competitors are doing

I fully agree with you about the value of moderation, but I think I disagree with your ideal bell curve due to the way domains are distributed; authority has a logarithmic nature and the number of domains at the low end far outweigh the number of sites at the high end, so even the best domains with no spammy signals probably have downward sloping backlink curves (think a high-quality news site that gets linked from thousands of blogs the next tiers down). So perhaps (just thinking out loud here, feel free to correct me) a more ideal moderate distribution would not be a bell curve in this instance but an evenly downward sloping curve where the proportions of lower DA backlinks are equivalent to the proportions of the total number of sites in those tiers.

Hi Josh, I see where you are coming from, but remember that I was outlining the 'ideal' backlink curve.

I agree there are lots of spammy sites out there, probably many more then there are medium & high quality sites. Yet, that doesn't mean that these spammy sites will necessarily link out to your site randomly. Rather, if you are getting a very large amount of backlinks from low quality spammy sites, the chances are that in some form or the other, you have engaged in low quality link building strategies at some point. (Or perhaps someone is using negative SEO against you.). This is what the first diagram above represents.

So if you have a decent site with decent content (which is the assumption we are working on here), it's my opinion that an ideal link profile will have the bulk of it's links in the meaty middle of the bell curve, because that is where the bulk of 'real', non-spammy sites and blogs sit, which are most likely to link out to good quality content naturally. Low quality sites won't necessarily link out naturally on a large scale to your good content. I'm talking here about blogs & sites that are willing to link out without having to be 'sponsored', your average industry blog with a good following. Of course the larger news sites will also link out naturally on occasion, but they are far less numerous then sites that sit in that meaty middle.

I hope that makes my position clearer, I'm keen to hear what you think?

Yes, I think I see what you mean. I guess it depends on how many links from low-quality sites any given site expects to see. I was assuming that everybody probably gets more links from low-quality sites simply due to the sheer number of sites compared to higher-quality sites (even spammers test links to wikipedia and yahoo, a medium high-quality site might still get linked by several obscure bloggers with little to no backlink profiles, etc) but I guess I haven't really looked at the proportions of enough sites to say for sure.